Writing in a Speaking World: The Pragmatics of Literacy in Anglo-Saxon Inscriptions and Old English Poetry by Peter Orton (review)

For people accustomed to have, in all communicative environments, the recipient of any of their utterances immediately before them, what was it like to have that listener removed to some future time and place? Where do we see signs of these new writers struggling to adjust to this newly opened gap in communication? Peter Orton takes up these questions in the context of Anglo-Saxon England in Writing in a Speaking World: The Pragmatics of Literacy in Anglo-Saxon Inscriptions and Old English Poetry. He is particularly interested in exploring how context-dependent linguistic signs like pronouns and tense markers are deployed when there is a significant gap between "coding time" (when the message is composed) and "receiving time" (when the message is received).

Orton's book represents a major contribution to the study of literacy's growth in Anglo-Saxon England, complementing such important studies as Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe's Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse (1990) and Seth Lerer's Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature (1991). He focuses chiefly on inscriptions and on self-referential instances in written texts, particularly the Old English riddles and lyrics. Orton assumes that inscriptions on hard surfaces, particularly with Germanic runes, represent an early, context-dependent type of literacy that precedes and shapes the subsequent, newly evolved generic forms found in manuscripts.

In looking at deictic expressions, "utterances . . . depending for their understanding at least partly on an awareness by the reader of the nature and position of the [communicative] vehicle" (p. xi), Orton's approach is very much from the ground up. By beginning with inscriptions (a large but manageable corpus) and moving then to self-referential moments in poetry, he initially works simply to assemble relevant examples, leaving his most significant analysis until later.

Perhaps it is thanks to the book's deceptive simplicity, but one feels slightly surprised that no one has taken this approach before. Indeed, Writing in a Speaking World offers a starting point for numerous, potentially rich lines of inquiry both in Anglo-Saxon and other contexts of "incipient literacy," to use Orton's phrase. Furthermore, in the course of his discussion, Orton proposes new readings of several Old English riddles, lyrics, and the text of the Ruthwell Cross that are in themselves well worth the price of admission. More generally, we note that the book is readable and well organized. Its logical, systematic organization and welllabeled chapter sections mainly compensate for the absence of an index.

The introductory first chapter surveys the existing scholarly literature on orality and literacy. It runs from Milman Parry, through Eric Havelock, Marshall McLuhan, and Walter Ong, and to O'Keeffe and Lerer; here, one feels that Orton is doing his due diligence more than assembling a coherent picture of literacy theory that he will draw upon subsequently. One also notes the somewhat dated references; while the book was published in 2014, few of the cited studies are later than 1999. While we have moved away from the totalizing generalizations of McLuhan and Ong, we actually do know a fair amount about the different cognitive processes (contra Orton) involved in interpreting and acquiring language. Fortunately, Orton's attention to "the different pragmatics of speech and writing" (p. 29) represents such a distinct line of inquiry that this datedness is not really a handicap.

In Chapter 2, "Deixis and Incipient Literacy," Orton describes his theoretical framework. He begins by trying to recreate the novelty of written language for people accustomed to having speakers and listeners occupy the same temporal and spatial zone. In effect, inscribed artifacts seem to have become "surrogates" for the absent reader or writer (depending on one's position as a coder or receiver...